McCOMB - Since retiring from full-time work, I've been reading more books, especially history, than when my daily schedule was more hectic.
I'm a slow reader, so it takes me weeks, sometimes months, to get through a 700-page volume of non-fiction.
But I've managed to read David McCullough's biographies of Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman, Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" and excerpts from some other works on World War II, Korea and the Civil War.
I'm currently reading a shorter work by Ambrose, a part-time Mississippian who recently died. His last book, personal reflections of an historian, is entitled "To America."
I was a fair history student in high school and college, and, without boasting, I probably know a little more American and Mississippi history than the average person, thanks in part to my reading of the subject and also to the fact that I've lived more of it than the average person.
But it's amazing what one can learn - or perhaps be reminded of - by reading some of the new books written by modern historians like McCullough and Ambrose.
For example:
I have long been aware that much of the economic disadvantages of the South during the 20th century could be linked to the Civil War - the vestiges of slavery and Reconstruction.
But I never associated the first transcontinental railroad, linking the east and west coasts of the United States, with the Civil War until recently while reading Ambrose.
The historian, who wrote a book on the building of the transcontinental railroad, has a chapter about it in "To America."
By 1850, Ambrose wrote, everyone in America wanted a rail link from the east to west coasts, and the technology was available to build it.
"But the cost would be heart-stopping and only the federal government had the resources - including all the land it owned - to finance the project," according to the historian.
"The Southerners in Congress wanted it to run from New Orleans through Texas to southern California, thus increasing the slave states' economy and political clout. The Northerners wanted it to run from Chicago to Sacramento and San Francisco, or from Minneapolis to Portland, increasing the free states' economy. The two sides blocked each other throughout the decade of the 1850s.
"In the 1860 campaign, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party pledged to get the construction going immediately. When Lincoln won the election, the South did the most stupid of all the stupid things it had done until then - it seceded from the Union, and its senators and representatives walked out of the Congress. That opened the way for the railroad, over the northern route, through the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, through the Great Basin, over and through the Sierra Nevada.
"With the nation at war from 1861 to 1865, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, one of the first things Lincoln and the Republican Party did after secession was to propose a bill authorizing and providing loans and land grants for the construction of a line from Omaha to Sacramento. There are many reasons why the South lagged so far behind the North in the century after the Civil War, and losing the war was certainly at the top of the list, but right behind came walking out of Congress and allowing the North to have the transcontinental railroad," concluded Ambrose.
This is one of many examples of the mistakes of one generation being felt far into the future. It's a lesson that too often is never learned by policy makers of every generation.
By the same token, history records many great decisions, such as the U.S. Bill of Rights, that reap benefits for generations.
